1. Field of the Invention
One or more embodiments of the present invention relate to image encoding and/or image decoding, and more particularly, to a method, medium, and system encoding and/or decoding an image having a plurality of color components.
2. Description of the Related Art
An image may have a plurality of color components. For example, the image may have a luminance (Y) component, a blue chrominance (Cb) component, and a red chrominance (Cr) component, or have a red (R) component, a green (G) component, and a blue (B) component.
When an image having a plurality of color components is encoded, the conventional image encoding technique includes sequentially encoding each color component. For example, the conventional image encoder may encode the image by encoding a Y component, then encoding a Cb component, and then encoding a Cr component. Accordingly, the conventional image encoder cannot compress an image promptly if the image has a large number of color components. Herein, references to such separate component encodings will also reference image terms, such as a 4:0:0 image, or a 4:4:4: image. These terms can refer to the amount of available data for each component, e.g., a 4:4:4 image may have an equal amount of data for each component. For example, using the 4:4:4 image again, in an YCbCr color space the amount of sampling performed for the Luminance component may be same as the sampling performed for the two chrominance components. If there was no sampling in both of the chrominance components, then such an image in the YCbCr color space may be considered a 4:0:0 image, for example.
Thus, when decoding a bitstream generated by encoding an image having such a plurality of color components, the conventional image decoding includes sequentially decoding each color component. For example, the conventional image decoder may decode the image by decoding a Y component, then decoding a Cb component, and then decoding a Cr component. In addition, as noted above, with such multiple components, an additional aspect that may need to be considered is differing sampling quantities between the different component, requiring in additional decoding consideration. Accordingly, such a conventional image decoding technique cannot restore an image promptly if the image has a large number of color components.